After cracking the global top 50 in the Pioneer Incubator yesterday (see previous update), we received our first feedback from a "Pioneer Expert." Here is what they said. 

Interesting idea—how do you think about the improvements that Great Album makes over existing solutions (like iOS's "memories" or "albums" feature that uses location/image metadata to group like images). I think there's a few dimensions to this problem: need, effort, and scale. On need, I'm guessing that this problem is something that most people would bucket into a "nice-to-have" and a small number of people view this as a pressing problem. How are you finding the group of people that are already doing this manually who would benefit most from Great Album? This is closely related to effort as I'm sure many people enjoy going through the Photos app on their iPhone and seeing some of the nice compilations Apple has made (trip to Japan, times spent with your cat, etc.). but wouldn't go out of their way to create these albums. Lastly, it depends entirely on your desire to turn Great Album into a venture-scale business vs. a lifestyle business, but in either case it'd be interesting to get a sense for what market size looks like.

We'll review you again after you submit another 2 progress updates.

Note that while about half of our Pioneers were selected after 1-2 months in the Tournament, others have persisted for far longer before winning -- even as long as a year!

Keep at it. We remain ever eager to see what you do next!

- The Pioneer Team

The Pioneer team raises some good points. Here are my replies:

• Need - I believe there is a much greater latent pain that people experience by not being able to easily browse, share and relive their experiences through their media, even if they aren't really expressing it now. No one missed having an iPhone before it was created, but now they couldn't live without it. I've conducted close to 70-80 customer interviews over the past 18 months, and 90%+ of the time, the response has been along the lines of, "OMG, that would be amazing if I could do that with GreatAlbum." Once people experience the joy having their media more accessible and shared, I think they won't want to live without it.
   
• Effort - People don't go out of their way to create these albums because it's time consuming - not just to create the album itself, but even more so to then identify all the people you really want to share it with. This is where GreatAlbum will dramatically simplify the experience, by creating albums once for each specific collection of members, then auto-creating events based on clusters of photos (which the user can refine as desired), and then making it easy to share those events into the appropriate new or existing albums, based on who they want to enjoy the event.
   
• Scale - good point on my preference for this to be venture-backed or a lifestyle business. I think it's deserving of become venture backed, but I've been conservative so far about really trying to take that plunge. At the moment, I want to get the Private Beta running again and prove product-market fit.